Top 20 at 10MILA

10Mila is, as always, one of the season highlights, and definitly one of the competitions that I enjoy the most throughout the year. I find it especially inspiring that we have a good young team, with a lot of talent, that really is on it’s way up.

Usually I run the last leg, but not this year, since it was the shortest leg in the relay. My thoughts during the winter was that I was going to run the 9th leg, but since långa natten, the Long Night,  was so late in the relay this year, we decided that it was best if I ran it. In one way I was a bit uncomfortable with this, since I know that I am a lot better during the day, but at the same time I was super excited! Every orienteer should run the long night at least once, and this was perhaps my chance? And of course, I wanted to do what was best for the team, which now turned out to be the 6th leg.

We talked a bit amongst ourselves in the team the days before, and decided to aim for top 20. Last year we were 31st, with a quite bad performance (mostly because of me), so this didn’t feel impossible. But still, when you looked at the teams that where top 20 last year you could tell that it was going to be tough.

We had a good start, and after 5 legs I was handed out as 29 by a quite dissappointed Assar, who had made some big mistakes in the beginning, but we were still in it, only 10.30 behind the leaders. I just did my race all the way, and was running a bit scrappy in the beginning, getting stuck in green a lot, and missing some seconds a bit too often. I got into it after a while though, and had a great run until after the 2nd TV control, where I (despite being really careful) missed the corner of an open area, and found myself on the wrong knoll, before relocating, losing almost 1½ min on this. But after that it was clean, and I could run into the change over as 20th, 6.30 behind, losing only 1 minute on the best split time, despite missing about 3 minutes and orienteering completely on my own all the way (despite having some good company out there – during the 2nd half I had both Merz in Tisaren and Millegård in Halden behind me, but I was running first for every meter of the course).

The rest of the legs went fine, and Yannick ran in as 21st after 9 legs, handing out to Love Berzell on the last leg. At this point I got really nervous, and almost dissappointed, since I could see that we probably were going to miss out on our top 20 goal. The teams right ahead of us was Kristiansand (with Martin Hubmann) and Tyrving (with Wojciech Kowalski), and for Love to pass them seemed impossible (which it also turned out to be). But Love had a great run, keeping up with KOK and Tyrving for quite a long bit, and eventually catching up MS Parma. Coming in to the finish, Love of course never gave the Parma guy a chance, and we finished as number 20, really happy!

My map
Results
GPS-tracking (where we have GPS on leg 6-10)

Thanks a lot to the rest of the guys running so well and making this possible! I’m already looking forward to next year!

The Team:

1.   Martin Lindskog
2.   Martin Poklop
3.   Ruslan Glebov
4.   Martin Hunhammar
5.   Assar Hellström
6.   Gustav Bergman
7.   Emil Granqvist
8.   Kalle Bergman
9.   Yannick Michiels
10. Love Berzell